A friend asked me, after reading my last interview with HuffPo, “So are you really stepping down from the marriage and religious liberty fight?”

No, I told him. Sorry if it sounded like that. What I am advocating doing is three very big, and very hard things: a) accepting where we are and b) learning from what we did not succeed in so that we can get to c) how do we build anew?

Right now most people who believe in the classic understanding of marriage are in shock, they are awed by the powers now shutting down the debate and by our ineffectualness at responding to these developments.

The temptation to shout and yell and stamp our feet in ineffectual ridiculousness is understandable, but it is to be resisted.

Over the last generation, there has been surprising stability in women’s gendered preferences for motherhood over work: The proportion of mothers who say full-time work is their ideal in 2012 was 32 percent, just a nudge up from the 30 percent who said so in 1997, according to an earlier study by Wang, a research associate at the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. (In 2007, at the start of the recession, just 20 percent of mothers described working full time as “ideal.”)